Detroit 9000: The Blaxploitation Police Procedural

The hook in Detroit 9000 is a fundraiser. A Black congressman is running for governor of Michigan — the first serious attempt — and the great and the good of the city are in a hotel ballroom writing cheques. Masked men come through the doors and take the lot: cash, jewellery, the collection plate of a whole political movement.

Everything that follows is a police procedural, and everything the film has to say arrives through the procedure. Who investigates. Who is trusted to investigate. Who gets told to leave it alone. Which questions can be asked in which neighbourhood and by whom. Arthur Marks made a 1973 exploitation picture that does its politics through paperwork, and it is the reason the thing still stands up.

The two-cop structure is the argument

Alex Rocco plays Lieutenant Danny Bassett, white, broke, with a wife in a private hospital he cannot afford. Hari Rhodes plays Sergeant Jesse Williams, Black, educated, a rising man in a department that has not decided how far it will let him rise. They are put on the case together for reasons that are entirely political and that everybody in the room understands.

The film’s structure does the work that a lesser picture would put in a speech. Because it is a procedural, the two men have to keep sharing information, and every exchange is loaded with what each of them can afford to say. Bassett’s poverty is a fact the film keeps returning to. Williams’s position is precarious in a completely different direction. They are both compromised, and their compromises do not match, so the investigation keeps stalling on things neither will put into words.

The casting of Rocco is a small masterstroke. He had played Moe Greene in The Godfather the previous year and had a face built entirely out of grievance, and Marks uses it as shorthand: here is a man who has been passed over so many times he has stopped expecting anything, and who now has to watch a younger Black colleague get the assignment on the strength of the department’s need for a photograph. The film lets Bassett be genuinely resentful about that, which is uncomfortable and honest, and it declines to make him a villain for it. Rocco plays the whole part as a man doing sums he keeps losing.

Marks shoots the department the way a documentary would: too many desks, bad light, a chain of command that exists to move blame downwards. The mechanics of the case — canvassing, informants, the slow narrowing of a suspect list — are laid out with a patience you rarely find at this budget. This is a film that believes police work is mostly asking people things.

Why the location shooting matters

Marks took the production to Detroit and shot in the actual city, and the decision is the whole picture.

The film was made five years after 1967, in a city that had been through something and was visibly still in it. The blocks Marks photographs are real blocks. The bar interiors are real bars. The famous foot chase runs through actual streets, in daylight, with real Detroit behind the actors, and the geography reads as continuous because it is continuous. The camera keeps catching things nobody dressed: empty lots, boarded frontages, the arithmetic of a city losing people.

That gives the film an authority its script could never generate on its own. When a character says a neighbourhood has been abandoned, the frame is already showing you the evidence. Marks does not have to argue, because he pointed the camera at the argument.

The comparison worth making is with the Italian cop films running at the same moment. The poliziotteschi worked the same way for the same reason — Rome and Milan on real streets, cheap, fast, furious about the state of the country — and the two cycles arrived at nearly identical grammar from opposite sides of the Atlantic without much contact. Both were made by people who could not afford sets and discovered that a real city is a better set.

There is a piece of pure craft in the foot chase that deserves the attention it gets. Marks runs it long, in continuous geography, with the camera keeping up rather than cutting around. You always know where the pursuer is relative to the pursued, which sounds elementary and is the single most commonly abandoned rule in action cinema. The sequence generates tension out of distance — the gap opens, the gap closes — and it needs no score, no shaky camera and no editing tricks to do it. Watch it next to any modern chase assembled from eighty setups and the older film is clearer, faster and more exciting on a fraction of the resources.

The ancestor is a Fifties B-picture

Everyone files this next to Shaft because of the year and the marketing, and the shelving is misleading. Gordon Parks made a private-eye film. Marks made a cop film, and the difference is structural: the private eye is outside the institution and therefore free to be cool, while Bassett and Williams are inside it and therefore stuck.

The real ancestor is the semi-documentary police cycle that ran through the late 1940s and 1950s — the films built out of case files, shot on location, narrated with a procedural flatness. The Naked City (1948) is the origin point and its DNA is all over this: the city as co-lead, the case as spine, the ordinary detective work given the running time that a chase would normally get. What Marks adds is the thing that cycle could never say out loud, which is that the procedure itself has a race problem, and the film makes that visible by having two men run the same investigation and get different answers from the same people.

The other bloodline is Marks himself. He came out of television — years of Perry Mason — and he shoots like it: efficient coverage, clean geography, no wasted setups. He went on to make Friday Foster and Bucktown and J.D.’s Revenge, and he is one of the genuinely underrated technicians of the cycle. Nobody made this many watchable films this fast by accident.

The Tarantino footnote

Detroit 9000 has a second life. It was reissued in 1998 by Rolling Thunder Pictures, Quentin Tarantino’s Miramax imprint for exactly this kind of rescue, and that reissue is how most people my age first encountered it — a restored print in an art-house cinema, sold on a director’s enthusiasm rather than the original poster.

The rescue was deserved and it also distorted the reception. A film that had run as a lower-half attraction in 1973 came back framed as a lost masterpiece. It is a solid, intelligent, extremely well-shot programme picture. The gap between those two descriptions is where a lot of arguments about the cycle live, and I have worked through the wider version in blaxploitation, genre cinema and the studio that followed the money.

The case against

The script is the weak link. The dialogue lands somewhere between television and pulp, and characters occasionally announce their function. There is a subplot involving a call girl that exists to satisfy the poster’s obligations and slows the film every time it appears.

The film’s racial politics are sharper than its contemporaries’ and they are also cautious. It raises the question of a police force that cannot investigate a Black neighbourhood without an escort and then declines to follow the question anywhere uncomfortable. Compared with The Spook Who Sat by the Door, released the same year with actual fire in it, this is a film that wants credit for noticing.

And Rhodes is underserved. Williams is the more interesting character on paper and the film keeps giving the emotional material to Bassett, whose sick-wife subplot is the most conventional thing in the picture. A braver film would have inverted the weighting.

The verdict: this is the best-directed film in the blaxploitation cycle that nobody thinks of as a blaxploitation film, and the reason is that Marks made a police procedural and let the marketing department worry about the rest. It survives because the craft is real — the location work, the geography, the patience with the case — and craft outlasts a poster.

Where to find it: the restored version has been on disc for years and circulates on the streaming services carrying the crime catalogues. Pair it with Across 110th Street, which took the same year, the same two-cop structure and considerably more despair, and the double bill is the best evening the cycle offers. For the wider shelf, the blaxploitation canon.

Spoilers below

The resolution is the film’s boldest move and its most argued-over.

The robbery turns out to be an inside job, engineered from within the congressman’s own circle. The men who took the ballroom were working for people who were in it. The political meaning of the crime — a white supremacist attack on a Black candidacy, which is what the city and the press have assumed for ninety minutes — was a story the perpetrators were content to let everyone tell.

That is a genuinely nasty idea and the film half-commits to it. Read generously, it is a picture about how a city’s racial assumptions can be used as camouflage by anyone who understands them well enough. Read ungenerously, it is a 1973 exploitation film that raises the spectre of organised racist violence and then reassures the audience it was money all along.

The last act ends in a cemetery, in a shootout, and Marks stages it with the same flat clarity he has used for everything else. Bassett and Williams finish the case. Neither man’s situation improves. The department is exactly what it was.

The refusal to reward anybody is the most convincing thing in the film. A procedural that ends with the procedure intact and every person inside it still trapped is telling the truth about the institution, and it is telling it in the one register the genre could smuggle past a distributor.